It has taken nothing short of a miracle to pin down Cecile Dominguez–Yujuico. It’s not because she chooses to be evasive, but the simple truth is that Cecile has been busy.

Running a growing business, overseeing a foundation, and building a new social media platform for good has kept her calendar full. And then of course, there is all that is waiting for her at home, and home for Cecile are her two boys, a big one and a little one.

The past few months have seen the young CEO of Evident Communications, an integrated marketing and public relations agency, busier than usual. Earlier this year, Cecile was honored as one of Campaign Asia’s Women to Watch for 2018. What caught the organization’s attention was Evident’s unusual focus on social impact. While many traditional agencies will collaborate with Non-Government Offices (NGOs) for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) work, Cecile has built a separate business unit founded on Evident’s NGO work. Not bad for the “agency outsider” that she is.

Just recently, retail brand Uniqlo named Cecile one of its 10 game-changing Future Heroes. The Uniqlo campaign was of particular interest to her because it gave her the opportunity to highlight a professional path that many people might not have thought possible. By example of her own non-linear career, she showed her young audience that they could build a business around their own passions and interests. “As a communicator or marketer, it doesn’t have to be just about product,” says this blue-sky thinker. “It can be about ideas, or it can be about moving an organization forward.”

Although Cecile’s speech is measured, it is also urgent and purposeful. Her discomfort is evident when asked to discuss her accomplishments but once she starts talking about her work, there is no stopping her. She is a woman with an imagination. She is also steadfast in her idea that through communication and technology, she can transform and improve the lives of others. She cites her work at the Conrado and Ladislawa Alcantara Foundation in Sarangani, Mindanao—a foundation named after her maternal grandparents—as her jump-off point in communications. “I came into communications from a very grassroots experience,” she says. “It wasn’t about selling products or communicating for a brand but about building relationships with key stakeholders on behalf of a company and managing community relations.

Cecile grew up in Mindanao. After graduating from high school in Davao, she moved to the United States where she attended the all-girls boarding school Dana Hall in Wellesley, Massachusetts for a year. She later attended Connecticut College where she focused on International Relations.

“I credit my liberal arts experience for preparing me for all that I am doing now,” she says. “The kind of critical thinking and world view gained through a liberal arts framework has helped me to look at things in an interdisciplinary way. It equipped me with the ability to understand different context and come up with integrated solutions.”

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In 2004, she moved to Manila to join the staff of Eduardo Ermita, then-executive secretary and spokesman of former Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. As a junior staffer in the Research and Assessment Secretariat for National Security, she witnessed the intense discussion and deliberation that went into high-level crisis management. Three years into her government work, she decided it was time to move on. But before returning to Mindanao, she worked on a short-term education reform project for the League of Corporate Foundations. The engagement aimed to improve Philippine test scores and literacy rates and it taught Cecile about the challenges of basic education.

This experience proved seminal in her decision to move to Sarangani, Mindanao where her brother, Migs Dominguez, was the governor at the time.

“We built an education program for the province and worked with parents, teachers, and members of the local government in the province’s seven municipalities. Our goal was to get everyone to recognize that education was a community responsibility,” she explains. “The school scores went from 46 percent to 76 percent, and our program garnered a Galing Pook Award for Best Practices in Local Governance.”

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Dominguez-Yuijuico at an education summit in Sarangani Province in 2009. PHOTO: COURTESY OF CECILE DOMINGUEZ-YUJUICO

At one of her education roadshows for Project Quest, the literacy program in Sarangani Province. PHOTO: COURTESY OF CECILE DOMINGUEZ-YUJUICO

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After spending three years in Sarangani, Cecile decided that she wanted to learn more about the field of communication. “I knew I was interested in it but I didn’t have much experience,” she admits.

This curiosity led her to pursue a master’s degree at New York University. After graduation, she returned to Manila and founded Evident. While Cecile had never run a business before, she was counting on the project management and team-building skills that she had developed during her time spent in Sarangani.

“Earning people’s trust has become my building block for Evident. I think about long-term relationships and how an organization or a business can engage with its public in ways that are mutually beneficial. “It’s less about ‘buy my stuff’ and more about ‘how do I create a lasting relationship built on trust with my customers.’”

In five years, Evident Communications has grown from a group of three to a team of 22 individuals with diverse backgrounds. The company has four focus areas: digital marketing, public relations, advocacy, and data and insights.

“It’s rewarding to help companies and their leaders move forward and bring their organization to a better a place,” she says. One of her key objectives is to get her clients to embrace digital and to be comfortable in today’s communications landscape where they are never in full control. She works to make sure that they are genuinely open to customer feedback and makes them understand that they are not necessarily their own audiences.

Her candor on the subject of agency-client relations is refreshing.

“Sometimes it’s hard for them to look at things through the eyes of their customer and that’s a challenge because they are so used to being in control,” says Cecile, who feels it is her role to lead them to a place where they are good with being a co-creator, or in some cases, getting them to let go completely to allow the content creators to work for their audiences.

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She sells them on the fact that today’s communication is about art and science.

“The science is the backbone, the Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the analytics, understanding what kind of content performs well and what do the algorithms prefer now. Currently, it’s all about video. The art is the creative side, the visuals, the angles, the copy. Both have to work together, but the art is what’s going to make it effective because people are emotive. It has to be visually appealing and it has to be interesting because no matter what you do with the SEO, if it’s not an interesting article, it’s not going to fly.”

Despite all the criticism that social media has been receiving as of late, Cecile remains a believer.

“I’ve always seen the internet as a good place. You have a choice about what you consume and what you share. You can choose to consume things that add value and ultimately it’s you who decides what to put out there and what to take from it. I chose to work with organizations and companies that want to fill that space with good things, not just for themselves but for the communities they serve.”

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"I presented on social impact storytelling for social media for Makati Med foundation and the heads of government hospitals that Makati Med foundation works with Evident project." PHOTO: COURTESY OF CECILE DOMINGUEZ-YUJUICO

Cecile believes in digital and social media so much so that she recently launched a social impact storytelling platform with Jonty Cruz called allgood.ph. This new digital space hopes to build a community of like-minded people who care. It doesn’t have a hard ask of a donation or request volunteer work, but instead hopes to share people’s inspiring stories because, as Cecile says, “there are a lot of great people who are doing a lot of great things and we hope to tell their stories in a rich and meaningful way.”

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Paying it forward is not a conscious decision, but a way of life for Cecile. She walks the talk every day in everything she does. In addition to the NGO work that Evident is involved in, she is a member of the board of directors of the Association of Foundations, a network of over 140 NGOs in the country. She also sits on the board of Teach for Philippines, and is the president of the Conrad Ladislawa Alcantara Foundation.

Dominguez-Yujuico at an USAID event with Conrado and Ladislawa Alcantara Foundation staff for the Flalok IP Literacy Project. PHOTO: COURTESY OF CECILE DOMINGUEZ-YUJUICO

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She talks about her future dream project, and it is no surprise that her vision revolves around building communities through education.

With partners from the Philippine Business for Education and Investing in Women (AusAID) and Evident Project. PHOTO: COURTESY OF CECILE DOMINGUEZ-YUJUICO

“I want to work on a nationwide message that gets everyone to care about the state of the public school in their community. Not just about the physical facilities but about really improving education. I would love to work on a campaign that gets more people to invest in their schools because everyone needs to play a part so that these kids have the best possible start.”

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Photographs by Joseph PascualProduced and styled by Paolo Chua, assisted by April LozadaMakeup by Patrick Alcober for Make Up For Ever and Apple FaraonHair by Ron VegarosAdditional art direction by Sandy Aranas, assisted by Grace SacaresShot on location at Artelano 11Special thanks to Eric Paras